Archives
Research expenditures at record high
By ARTHUR PAGE
Assistant Vice President
Research expenditures at UB across all disciplines reached a record $323.42 million in the 2007 fiscal year (FY 2007) ending last June 30, according to the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Research and Development Expenditures at Universities and Colleges.
For the first time, UB’s research expenditures in sciences and engineering have surpassed the $300 million mark, and at $314.83 million, those expenditures were 5.7 percent greater than in the previous fiscal year.
Research expenditures in other areas—such as the humanities, education, social work and professional programs—were up more than 25 percent from the previous year, with total expenditures of $8.58 million.
Jorge V. José, vice president for research, noted that UB’s research expenditures in the sciences and engineering have increased by nearly 22 percent since FY 2004 (the year President Simpson started his tenure at UB), when they were $258.95 million.
“UB’s faculty investigators across all of its three campuses are increasingly very successful in today’s very competitive research-funding climate,” José added. “The research partnerships that have been established across departments, centers and institutes throughout the disciplines at the university’s different campuses, and as a result of UB 2020, have helped leverage our researchers’ ability to attract substantial research funding.
“Our scholarly accomplishments in areas outside science and engineering also underscore UB’s comprehensiveness as a premier public research university of the 21st century.”
José said that while total research expenditures at UB continued to climb in FY 2007, there was a drop in federal expenditures of 2.8 percent, reflecting a reduction or only nominal increases in funding in the federal budget to large agencies that fund university research. He noted, for example, that federal funding for the National Institutes of Health, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), has remained essentially flat during the past five years, resulting in a loss of approximately 11 percent in the NIH’s “purchasing power” to fund research due to inflation.
At UB, he said, DHHS funding of $95.6 million represented 47.3 percent of total federal expenditures, a decrease of 8.6 percent from FY 2006. This decrease reflects a national trend, but is not as large as decreases experienced by some other leading research universities. On the other hand, funding of UB research from the U.S. Department of Defense increased 20.7 percent to $22.8 million.
José noted that major factors reflected in the increase in UB’s science and engineering research expenditures in FY 2007 included a 15.6 percent increase in industrial funding and a 15.4 percent increase in state and local government expenditures.
Expenditures for research in the life sciences accounted for 67.9 percent of UB’s $314.83 million in science and engineering expenditures, while medical research expenditures represented 69 percent of the life sciences total.
Research expenditures in engineering had a 16.1 percent increase over FY 2006, and expenditures in the physical sciences experienced a 12.5 percent increase over the prior year.